So I’ve finally finished all the “little stuff” in the visualization: 1) I got a soccer jersey for the Hispanic person, so he looks a bit more distinctive now. 2) Every desk now has science equipment for “realism”. 3) I added a sign under the map that tells user what region they selected. 4) I added the ability to have no region select where the sign says that and all the people/stats disappear. 5) I took pictures of the Jepson wall/floor/ceiling and made them the wall/floor/ceiling of my room. The walls seem to come in slightly different colors, even though they’re the same texture (which is noticeable, but not too bad), and I can’t really figure out why (I spent about a half hour on that to no avail).

That should round out the visualization, barring any small suggestions Dr. Polac/the rest of the group have. Some pictures for everyone:

This break has been a success for my project.  Over the past few days, I did all of the super tedious/long/boring work of creating/cropping/uploading the signs, and today I created a system to add them into the visualization.  All that’s left of the main functionality of the room is to finish the Hispanic person and change the look of the room.  If we decide to do the high school data, it’ll take a while to add more signs, but beyond that it won’t be hard.

Here’s a screenshot of the visualization in action:

So this past week has been pretty terrible school-work wise; I haven’t been able to do anything in Second Life.  Hopefully I can do a bit over the weekend before Monday, but if not, I think I’ll spend a bit of Thanksgiving break grinding out the more repetitive parts of the visualization design.

I did, however, make an outline for my paper.  Except for the introduction, I think it’s pretty good.  I more or less based it off my summer powerpoint presentation, and added in a couple things.   I really don’t know what to do for the introduction, so if anyone has some clarification info or just general feedback on my outline I’d really appreciate it.

 Paper Outline: (sorry about the spacing, but WordPress seems to double space for some terrible reason)

Introduction

       -Explain project/premise (similar to summer abstract?)

       -?

Background

       -what census/data is

       -transportation/education data and specifics that go with them

       -how you get data/sift through it

       -explain visualizing and show screenshot of 2d data

       -flaws with 2d version and pick of second life

       -explain about second life/classes/worlds

       -go through processes/stages of building the first room (summer)

       -go through process/stages of building the second room (fall)

Experiment

      -describe what it tests

      -makeup of the questions

      -premise of experiment

      -subject profile

Results

     -accuracy

     -speed

     -satisfaction

Conclusion

     -where project is going with visualizations

     -new tests on more people

     -pinpoint exactly why one is better than the other

Not only do I have a screenshot of the room in action, but I also have the first beta of the Hispanic person.  Warning:  it doesn’t look amazing (I find it to be the hardest one to do), but I think does the basic job ok.  If anyone has anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to let me know.

The Room in Action:

Hispanic Person Beta 1:

Ok, so this week has been pretty fruitful. Dr. Polack sent me the data, so I started to write the main code for the gut of my visualization. If you now click on the map, I have the black table and asian table showing the correct amount of people. Putting in the white won’t be hard at all, and the hawaiian/indian ones will be piece of cake (mostly because they don’t show up at all). All that will be left is to make the Hispanic person and display him (I won’t be done of course, but with the really important stuff I will).

My only design qualm is the rounding I’ve had to undertake. I’ve decided to give anything between 1-7% 1 person, anything 7-12% two people, 13-17.5% percent 3, etc. This creates a slight problem because I sometimes end up with one too many people on the floor, so I just delete one from the white person category to compensate (considering each time the white person has 15 or more, I don’t feel so bad about it). This means the visualizations won’t be exact, but I don’t feel so bad about that since it’s supposed to approximate to a reasonable degree to make the data easier to understand.

In the next day or two I’ll post a screenshot of what the working visualization looks like (however, it’ll be much better on Wednesday to just try it out in front of everyone since it’s moving).

This week I’ve been occupied with my main goal of moving all my stuff from the OLN Island to the new UMW only area.  So far, I’ve got my entire new room done, but still have to move the old visualization room to go before Wednesday.  After I’m done moving, I’ll delete everythign off the OLN island and start with the main project material again.

Here’s a screenshot of my new setup (and to show off the huge size different between my rooms and everything else on the island):

Believe it or not, the trick of using the wireless connection in my dorm instead of the Ethernet actually works! I was able to get on Second Life again today with no problems, so I finished the next version of the room set up, and also bought a lot of lab equipment (beakers, test tubes, etc.) to put on the lab tables once I’m done with the more important stuff. I’ll post a screenshot in here to show everybody what the room now looks like.

As far as my plan for the rest of the semester goes, my main objective is to completely finish the setup and workings of the visualization room. At this point, finishing the room is completely essential, but anything else will be icing on the cake. I’m not sure how many weeks are left (6? 7?) but here’s the plan:

Week 9: Finish the basic setup of the room/Get data and start putting into all parts of the room

Week 10: Finish data and add “lacking” elements (signs, hispanic person)

Week 11: Finish elements and make any necessary modifications to the room

Week 12: Start adding extra aesthetic stuff (lab equipment, room setup)

Week 13: Make sure everything works properly, test a lot

Week 14/15: Deal with any final complications, start on extra stuff that doesn’t need to be finished this semester
That’s roughly what I want to do. I also want to make sure to move my room to the new island, but I didn’t feel like putting that in there (if anyone sees this during the meeting, if I forget, remind me to tell Dr. Polack to send me the data and invite me to the actual island).

And here’s my screenshot of the room so far:

So I think I might’ve figured out a way to get on Second Life…no one really seems to use the wireless connection in Westmoreland, so right now I’m using that to successfully connect.  Hopefully this will continue for a long time.

Anyway, I’ve got a bit more to do before Wednesday.  I’m currently in the process of remodeling the room to make it much bigger.  Also, I put in a back platform with stairs where the second row of desks can sit.  I’ve also decided that when I move everything to the new island, I’m probably going to use the invisible trick rather than replicating.  Since we’ll have a lot more prims for me to use, this will be easier and faster in the long run.  I’ll post some pictures up tomorrow or Tuesday.

So I can’t stand it anymore.  Something has to be done about this internet connection problem.  This is ridiculous…no matter when I try and sign on to Second Life, the connection is never fast enough to work at school.  It’s currently 10:59pm on Tuesday night, and I’ve tried both my Westmoreland connection on my laptop and the Trinkle connection on a lab computer, and neither can get onto Second Life properly.  All the objects in the room aren’t downloaded, my character can’t interact with anything, and I can’t even move.  My clothes won’t even load correctly!

I really have no clue what to do at this point.  I know that sometimes I’ve put off the project for homework in regular classes, but I’ve never gotten this far behind just because I can’t sign into Second Life.  In roughly two weeks, the only major amount of time I’ve been able to spend on this project is when I was at home over Fall Break.  That obviously won’t work now that I’m back on the school internet connection instead of my own.

What I did accomplish, however, was to make the final version of the lab table (mostly fixed size problems), started to lay out the room as to how I’d want it, and the big thing I did was work on the script to make people appear.  If you click on the rightmost white guy, he’ll replicate himself, or if you type “/201 n” where n=1,2,3,…, then you’ll have n copies of the white guy 1 meter next to each other (don’t do more than 4 though, or the extra copies will go out of the room and clog the server).  Thus, all I need now is the data for each type of person, and I can easily hard code the numbers into to make a certain number of replications (i think i want rows of 5 people, thus 19 would be 3 rows of 5 and 1 back row of 4).  Since there is a slightly delay within replication, for the white person (who will obviously have the largest statistics), I might have the first 5 be invisible instead of pop up on the fly.   I’d have photographs for everyone, but I can’t get into Second Life to take pictures…

But yeah, the major problem is that I don’t really know what to do right now about the internet…there’s no way I can stay up until 3-5am every night to work on this project when the internet cools down.  I’m not sure it’s really feasible for me to hike to McDonald’s or Hyperion every time I want to use Second Life (and what guarantees that they have a fast enough connection anyway?).  I seriously doubt the IT could either give me/the other Second Life people/the Trinkle lab extra bandwidth so we can run Second Life…does anyone have any ideas? (especially everyone else using Second Life).  I’m currently at a huge loss right now, and I don’t know what to do before this project gets really backlogged.

This internet connection is really starting to grate me.  I can’t really do anything in Second Life, no matter what hour I try (right now at 2am it still doesn’t work).  It’s making my project impossible.  What am I going to do when I need to test people?  Ask them to work at 4 in the morning?

This being said, I’ve gotten a little bit done since the last meeting.  I’ve been working on a script to create people on the fly, in case I can’t just hide the people somewhere.  I’ve also darkened the desk that’s going to be used.  I tried to work with that shapemaker program some more, but I just can’t figure it out.  Hopefully I can talk with Dr. Polack before she leaves to figure it out, otherwise I’ll have to create something myself.   That and the Hispanic person are my two biggest obstacles right now.